Trauma-Induced Amnesia

Edit Locked

Sometimes, when somebody goes through a severe, emotionally traumatic experience or suffers a physical head injury, their brain removes the memory of that event; this causes Trauma Induced Amnesia. These memories can be often recovered over time through therapy, magic, or whatever is appropriate in the setting; but sometimes, another traumatic experience will bring them to the surface in Flash Back form. Sometimes depicted as appearing only in Bad Dreams, which often results in Dreaming the Truth. Sometimes, the memories simply come back on their own.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime and Manga

Kiri from Ga-Rei -Zero- loses her memories and subsequently reverts to the personality of a young child after being nearly killed by Yomi. The final episode does show that she is at least making progress towards recovery.

In Macross Frontier, Ranka fits this trope to a T: she saw her family killed by the Vajra, and she promptly forgot all of her life up to that point. Furthermore, when she next meets the Vajra, she starts to have traumatic Flash Backs to the aforementioned event.

Used in Macross Plus, though in this case, the traumatizer has the amnesia, as Guld was shocked by his assault on the woman he loved. He kept enough of the memory to falsely blame Isamu, the friend who actually won her heart, for the event... only to have it all crash back on him when he thought he had succeeded in killing Isamu, realising that Myung and Isamu knew it all along and kept the secret to not hurt the three of them further. Then, Redemption Equals Death is the only way to go.

A particularly well-done example appears in Elfen Lied, in which Kohta has Trauma Induced Amnesia and an Angst Comaabout Lucy killing his father and sister in front of his eyes.

Suzaku Kururugi from Code Geasskilled his father in a fit of childish and desperate rage, during a discussion about the fate of their country - Genbu wanted to fight Britannia to death, Suzaku disagreed; the trauma from the realization of what had happened caused him to develop amnesia about it. After C.C. accidentally invades his mind to save Lelouch from him, he gets the memories back and is so shaken that he goes into an Heroic B.S.O.D.. And Mao uses this to mind rape him again.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shinji saw his mother Yui die in EVA-01. He might still remember it somewhere deep down, as evidenced by brief flashes of little-Shinji staring through a window at the incomplete Unit 01 (which is off-camera) while trapped inside his Eva after Zeruel. Though the viewpoint might suggest that he may have seen someone else's memories.

Princess Tutu did this with not one, but two characters—Rue buries her memories of being Princess Kraehe and having the Raven as her father, putting on a charade for years about only being Rue and being nothing more than a normal human girl. Her memories are all dug up by the end of the first season. Fakir takes a little longer to remember his traumatic past: He watched his parents die as they protected him from crows he had summoned using his writing powers.

Sasuke Uchiha forgot two things after the massacre of his family. One is that he activated his Sharingan for the first time and chased Itachi. The second is that Itachi was crying before he left Sasuke. He doesn't remember either event until Itachi's death.

Same goes for Kakashi Hatake. He didn't know that he unlocked the Mangekyo Sharingan after he killed Rin. The sheer shock of killing her likely caused said amnesia. It's even more likely that his trauma was such, that he even forgot that he killed her.

A good portion of the clients in Nightmare Inspector have been through something traumatic, thus why they're having nightmares in the first place. Unfortunately, few of them actually remember the event until near the end of the chapter.

Usagi aka does this in the Sailor Starsmanga, after Sailor Galaxia kills Mamoru in front of her. She's so traumatised that she blocks the incident out of her mind. Boy, does it hurt when she remembers. (In the anime, she was spared of seeing this since Mamoru got Put on a Bus First, and then Galaxia crashed it; she truly had no idea of what had happened, and only realized it upon seeing Mamoru's Star Seed in Galaxia's possession... right after she had killed the Inner Senshi)

Mamoru himself was left with amnesia after he survived a car accident that killed his parents. His amnesia is portrayed (mostly) accurately in that he spent some time in a coma before finally waking up, and when he did he could barely remember how to speak let alone anything that happened previously. He's also never fully recovered memories of the event or his younger life.

In the Yellow arc of Pokémon Special, Red's Pika suffers this after witnessing his fellow Pokemon getting blasted away and his trainer receiving a direct kick to the stomach from a Hitmonlee.

Silver's Sneasel also suffered this right after Silver was kidnapped. Both cases are important because trauma makes it difficult for Yellow and Lance (who both are blessed with special powers) to accurately read their memories.

Chapter 10 of Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force revealed that Lily's amnesia was due to the trauma of her life as a lab experiment, which caused her memory to deteriorate as she tried to escape her grim reality by retreating into the Happy Place of her mind.

Happens to Ran Mouri in one of the Detective ConanNon serial movies, Captured in her Eyes, after she not only catches a clear view of the murderer, but is almost shot to death by him and the other local Action Girl Satou takes FOUR bullets for her. The victim spends a good part of the movie in an Heroic B.S.O.D., barely able to take care of herself and others, and the trope is lampshaded as her doctor says she might be afraid to recover her memories due to the events that made her go amnesiac. She doesn't recover until the Big Bad tries to kill both her and Conan in exactly the same way; she reacts by loudly declaring her martial arts expertise and curbstomping her rival.

Also happens to a teenager named Touma Tachihara in the fifteenth movie (Quarter of Silence). He wakes up after an eight-years-long, without any memories of the certain incident that caused it in the first place; the key to solve the mystery relies on him getting his memories back. It turns out that Touma witnessed a hit-and-run, was kidnapped by the culprit (a friend of his mom), and while trying to escape he fell off a cliff...

And in one of the specials, this happens to Conan Edogawa himself after he hits his head during an outing to a bath house. Then he's kidnapped by a bunch of criminals who believe he knows too much...

Kai Hiwatari of Beyblade lost his memory after trying to use Black Dranzer when he was too young led to the destruction of the Abbey. It's not clear if this is due to emotional trauma, or physical trauma from debris.

In the manhwa Totally Captivated, Ewon completely forgets a rather important childhood event because of the beating that immediately preceded it, and the hypothermia that immediately followed it - unfortunately for him the violent Hair-Trigger Temper mafia boss who this was also an important event for does remember, and gets fairly pissed off that he doesn't. He eventually remembers after a period of Poor Communication Kills which finally leads to him again almost freezing to death.

Tokiko Tsumura of Busou Renkin acquired this at the age of ten after watching a homunculus eat every single person in her school (Quite possibly including her parents, as her family never gets mentioned in the manga) alive, leaving her the only survivor (She managed to hide until she was rescued by Captain Bravo).As a result of this, she blanked out her entire life before waking up in the Alchemic Army's hospital, and never regains those memories.

This is what happened to Ganta, where Hagire (as part of his Body Surfing plot) hooked him onto a machine and forced him to witness himself as a child watching his child-hood friend Shiro brutally massacre a room full of science staff when they forced her to use her blood powers on a baby lamb. She lets the lamb live, an obvious Pet the Dog Moment... before her transformation into the monstrous Red Man, who went on a rampage and killed Ganta's school friends years later which him sent to the titular sadistic prison in the first place.

Happens to Jeudi from Honoo No Alpen Rose, who suffers this after being the Sole Survivor of a plane crash. The main plot of the series is about her and her boyfriend Lundi trying to make her remember who she truly is.

It's later subverted in the same series: Mathilda claims that she has this and thus cannot remember any details of her and her "mother" Helene's former life before shit went down the toilet... but in reality Mathilda is a Body Double of Jeudi/Alicia, so she cannot remember a life that she never lived. This bites her in the ass later, when Jeudi turns out to have remembered the Alpen Rose song that was the family trademark and that undoes Mathilda and her father's plans.

In Private Actress, Shiho actually invokes the trope on Cute Psycho Satoka, traumatising her so badly in an incident involving fire and the setting of a movie that Satoka mentally reverts to a child-like state, unable to remember any recent events. This is seen as an alternative to killing her, actually: Shiho's last Private Actress "client" had told her to punish Satoka for causing the death of his girlfriend, which he had been trying to do until he was fataly wounded by Satoka herself, and Shiho felt that this was the best course of action against a Serial KillerEnfante Terrible like her.

PoorKuya from Utawarerumono finally ended up with this after all the crap she went trought and practicly reverted back to infancy, not even remebering how to speak and only remembereing Hakuro's name. Argubly it was probably the best that could have happened to her.

In the Kare Kano manga, Souichiro Arima has repressed almost all of the memories of his early childhood, where he was abused to horrifying degrees by his Evil Matriarch mother Ryouko. (He does know the basic facts due to his relatives, but he himself cannot remember how it happened.) When these traumatising memories start to return, he's already a highschool student... and he pretty much snaps.

Murasakiiro no Qualia presents an uncommon variant where said amnesia doesn't happen right after the fact but several years later. To get over her childhood trauma caused by Yukari's Magical Eyes, at least in one of the parallel worlds, Tenjou, sometime in between the last year of middle-school and age 25, chose to re-observe her past and completely forget about those troublesome and traumatic events.

Di[e]ce has Naoto, who turns out to have repressed his entire sad backstory. He misremembers/flat-out forgets being shunned by his classmates, abandoned by his father and abused by his mother. He also forgets that his mother attempted suicide and is comatose in the hospital; rather, he seems to have deluded himself into thinking she's recovering. He's shown talking to her on the phone, but in retrospect, she can't have had much to say.

One case in the Ace Attorney manga has a variation, in that the person didn't forget the trauma-inducing events, but rather the order they took place in. A young girl named Diana Wheatley was kidnapped a child by a cruel and crazy woman, then saved two days later by her mother, who sadly died two days after that. It turns out that her "kidnapper" was her abusive stepmother, and her "mother" was The Kindnapper, and her real mother. The mother who died was Diana's stepmother, not her real mother, but Diana was so shaken up by the whole event that her memories were completely altered.

Lupin III: The Columbus Files: Though it's assumed that Fujiko lost her memories through a concussion caused by the fall, she is often haunted by the image of an ominous-looking hand trying to grab her. At the film's climax, when she finally manages to take Lupin's hand, she breaks through her trauma, causing her to regain her memories.

Attack on Titan has a variation concerning repressed and altered memories, brought on by severe trauma. Reiner was unable to cope with the trauma and guilt of his actions as The Mole, and suffers dissociative episodes as a result. During these episodes, he forgets his true identity and past, truly believing he's a human soldier. When he's forced to recognize what is happening, he's deeply shaken.

Eren himself has a case of this: The gaps in his childhood memories were due the trauma of him eating his father Grischa in Titan form, and coming to next to what little was left over.

Yogi from Karneval was the only survivor of a nationwide experiment which resulted in complete annihilation of his country and it's citizens. The, by then, 10 year-old prince had to witness the decapitation of his caretakers at the hands of Varuga, was experimented on for an unknown amount of time and once gaining consciousness was strapped to his surgery table and forced to watch a video where his little sister was literary torn to shreds, all while pleading for his help. The trauma caused him to not only develop a Split Personality but made him forget that the event ever took place. When found and saved he had murdered all of the scientists and was brought to Circus to once again be experimented on. He still believes his family is alive, but was told that he couldn't meet them due to the danger of them being targeted

Harlequin from The Seven Deadly Sins fell victim for this 700 years prior to the main plot after an old knight ambushed and struck him from behind, while he was checking on the corpses of his fallen comrades. An event which ultimately resulted in the Fairy King's sin through an unconscious 500 year leave from his duties

The main character of the manga Kuro, Coco, is said to have fallen victim to this following the deaths of her parents. She lives all alone with only her pet cat, Kuro, and seems to have no inclination to wonder why her parents aren't around. Her tutor, Brenda, also discovers that, while Coco keeps an otherwise immaculate house, her paernts' room is so covered with dust it's clear she hasn't been near it in ages.

Sabo of One Piece is Luffy's second brother, long presumed-dead after offending a member of the World Nobility and getting blasted away as a result. He reappears during the Dressrosa arc, to Luffy's shock, and aids in the battling the conflict there. The reason he never appeared in front of either of his brothers before that point was because the same incident that made everyone think he was dead also caused him to be badly injured and lose his memory. The event that restored Sabo's memory was equally traumatic, as it resulted from learning about Ace's death in the battles at Marineford. Specifically, it was reading about Ace being killed by Admiral Akainu, a.k.a. Sakazuki, because it made him remember exchanging sake cups, or sakazuki, with Ace and Luffy as children; as a result Sabo had a screaming Heroic B.S.O.D., fell into a brief Angst Coma, and when he woke up he had regained his lost memories... but he felt horrible for not having been with Ace and Luffy when they needed him the most, even when it really wasn't his fault.

One hypothesis about Wolverine's lost childhood memories was that they were too painful to think about so his healing factor suppressed them.

Now his daughter/Opposite-Sex CloneX-23 has gone through the same thing, and doesn't even realize she's a mutant when she first turns up in All-New X-Men. She was last seen being rescued by Wolverine from Murderworld and in her very next appearance is being pursued by Purifiers, but what happened in-between has yet to be revealed.

In the Astro City story "Ellie's Friends," Ellie suffers a Heroic B.S.O.D. whenever she tries to recall the events from her college years, due to a traumatic Mind Rape incident.

Fan Works

Danny suffers a rather extreme case in the Danny Phantom fanfic "Lost", wherein he doesn't only forget the event, he gets full-blown retrograde amnesia as a combo of head trauma, PTSD, and creating black holes in his brain. He is forced to relive the trauma through real-life psychological flashbacks.

In the Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name fanfiction Dead of Night, it's implied that this trope is the reason the Detective forgot the first thirty or so years of his life. It was confirmed by Vesser that the memory loss wasn't caused by magical blocks, he had been found post-amnesia with a huge gash on his chest stapled shut, and about a year back, the still-alive Hanna had been trying to find him, telling everyone he'd been kidnapped.

In The Bridge, Monster X's horrifying experiences prevent him from remembering the life he once had with his wife and parents before he was transformed into a Kaiju. The trauma in question being fighting Grand King Ghidorah, seeing his wife die in front of him, transforming into Kaizer Ghidorah, and mass psychic whiplash that split his mind into two personalities, X and Kaizer. The author even referenced this trope by name while describing him.

Ryuuko during the events Concerning a Drifter is having a hard time remembering her life before and around the time of her captivity and rapes due to the resulting trauma and mental illness. Said amnesia in this case doesn't just happen with what had happened to her, it also extends to happy memories of before or her name. When she does recall anything, she either doesn't remember it too well or she mostly recalls anything that isn't specific about it. She mostly borders on Repressed Memories.

In How the Light Gets In Laurel comes Back from the Dead with amnesia. Initially she's in a daze, and barely seems to recognize anyone, but seeing her daughter makes her "wake up". However most of her memories are still gone, and slowly get "triggered": seeing a necklace makes remember Tommy (and his death), kissing Dean makes her remember their wedding, and seeing Sara brings back all her memories all at once giving her a seizure..

After spending eight months in a coma, Chiaki in Extra Life loses her memory of Junko's torture and attempted murder of her. Gradually, the memories start to come back through nightmares, before a near-mugging triggers them to return all at once.

Film

In The Reveal it turns out to be what the whole plot of The Machinist really was about: Trevor Reznik is psychologically and physically decaying from a past incident which he has mentally suppressed. He accidentally ran over a small boy with his car, but fled the scene to escape the consequences. He has since become an emaciated husk and suffered a psychotic break due to the guilt driving him mad.

The Blind Side: Michael has this; Sean mentions halfway through the movie about how "Michael's gift is his ability to forget" his Dark and Troubled Past, and near the end, Michael explains how he would "close his eyes" when bad things happened.

The cult sci-fi movie K-PAX contains one of these as part of The Reveal, though like everything else in the film, it's a bit more complicated than just that.

The Bourne Series (like the novels) is based around this concept. In the movies Jason Bourne fails to kill his target because there are young children present (and he knows he would have to kill them too). He is then shot and left for dead. He awakens with no memory of who he is or that he is an assassin.

The Long Kiss Goodnight: The main character has no memories prior to waking up, badly injured, on a beach seven years ago. After a car accident, she discovers that she's VERY good with knives, and other pieces of her past begin to come back. She gets all her memories back after she's tortured and almost drowned.

In Love Letters, Victoria witnessing the murder of her husband by the hands of her aunt causes her to completely forget her own identity.

Jeanne, the protagonist of Ne Te Retourne Pas ("Don't Look Back"), is unable to remember anything about her life prior to a traumatic car crash when she was 8 years old.

The titular hero of RoboCop (1987), who was brutally murdered by a gang of criminals who finished him off with a single shot to the head. Despite suffering brain damage and being medically dead for a long time, he begins to regain his lost memories over time after being revived as as a law-enforcing cyborg. note This is, believe it or not, physiologically plausible: people can survive massive trauma to the brain such as a gunshot wound, and often suffer retrograde amnesia because of it; and the brain is capable of repairing itself over time thanks to a well-known property of it called neuroplasticity.

In The Search, Karel is a little boy who was a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. When he is taken in by the United Nations along with other child refugees and placed in a UN camp, he can't remember his name or where he came from.

Beckett, in The Skeptic, can't remember how his mother died when he was five, and in fact remembers very little about her. This is because she was horribly abusive and he accidentally killed her by intentionally leaving his toys out at the top of a flight of stairs.

Literature

In A Brother's Price, Ren forgot for some years what, exactly, happened before the explosion that killed most of her family. Then she has a nightmare, which she can remember afterwards, and realizes that this was what happened - her sister said something like "I wished he was dead" about their abusive husband, who was inside the building, too. This serves to explain why Halley, who ran away to find the culprits for the death of their family, is so obsessed about it; she needs to get rid of her feelings of guilt about those words.

In the Cal Leandros series, Cal was kidnapped by the Auphe when he was fourteen and dragged through a portal to their home world/dimension/whatever. When he escaped, he had no memory of what went on during those two years. Darkling mentioned that it involved torture and learning how to open portals in preparation for the Auphes' plan to destroy humanity.

In Animorphs, Rachel loses her memory after being mobbed in bald eagle morph by a group of rowdy crows and slamming into a tree.

In "See Jane Run" - a psychological thriller by Joy Fielding - the very first thing we read is how main heroine Jane Whittaker forgets who she is on her way shopping. And what the hell are those blood stains on her clothes and this large sum of money in her pocket?!

While we've never seen the cause, the Duck Man from Discworld may suffer from this. His occasional, vague musings about life before he became a beggar suggest that something quite nasty happened in his past.

Cole has this in the last episodeTracker. An imbalance in his life force containment device was triggered by having captured only one of a set of alien twins, and Cole was basically given a nasty electric shock that wiped out his memory.

Induced deliberately in Caliban. Kresh figures out who attacked Doctor Leving when he realized that it wasn't a failed murder attempt that resulted in her being unable to remember much about the evening in which it happened, but a calculated assault to make her forget what she had been doing at the time of the attack.

The Tommy and Tuppence novel The Secret Adversary has Janet Vandemeyer, the niece of one member of a group of conspirators who lost her memory after being caught in the sinking of the Lusitania. All professional treatment had proven fruitless before she was pulled out of a nursing home for unknown reasons. She's actually Jane Finn, kidnapping victim and the only person alive who knows the location of secret documents that could bring about down the downfall of Great Britain. The whole thing is subverted, though, because she'd been bluffing the entire time.

One story in The Mysterious Mr Quin has two sisters and their lady-in-waiting go on a cruise, with one of the sisters drowning when the ship sinks. In fact it was the lady-in-waiting who drowned, one sister lost her memory, and the other sister took advantage of the amnesia to convince her she was the lady-in-waiting so as to inherit the family fortune. The sister starts getting flashes of her memory back, and ends up killing her sister before dying of a heart attack.

In Heart of Steel, Mad Scientist Alistair Mechanus can't remember who he was past ten years ago, aside from vague flashbacks to a previous life. Eventually it is revealed that he suffered a psychotic break after the death of his college girlfriend, whom he'd hoped to revive from her coma.

If ever a character had an ironclad excuse for traumatic amnesia it's Sara, heroine of Restoree who is kidnapped by hideous, cannibalistic aliens and literally skinned alive along with the other captives. By the time she comes out of her fugue state she's been given a new skin, a new nose and some other 'work' and is on an entirely different planet.

In Alan Garner's Boneland it is hinted that this is a possible reason for Colin's inability to recall anything that happened to him before his thirteenth birthday. His medical records reveal that he was struck by a freak lightning bolt on top of Stormy Point.note this was a key location in The Moon of Gomrath, where Colin and Susan fought the forces of Evil He is also note apparently given a hospital MRI-scan where inexplicable brain damage is discovered.

In The Machineries of Empire, Jedao has only snippets and flashes of memories from the Hellspin Massacre as a result of what he did there.

In the web-novel Domina, this is apparently what happens to the changelings. They are kidnapped by the fey, horrifically tortured and experimented on, to the point that by the time they escape they have absolutely no memories of their lives before the fey. Later chapters reveal that the changelings are actually homunculi, Artificial Humans built from the ground up. The fey give them some basic skills like language, but can't implant any real memories. It's not explained why the fey do this, but it's implied that they knew they needed people to oppose them and keep them in check.

Live-Action TV

The first season of 24 had this happen to Teri as blatantly obvious padding. After escaping the terrorists who held them hostage, Teri tells Kim to stay in the car while she figures out where they are. Car goes over the side of the embankment and explodes, Teri collapses, and wakes up with no memory of who she is.

Claire on Lost lost her memory of her kidnapping by Ethan and the Others, requiring hypnosis to recall some details.

The Eighth Doctor of Doctor Who suffered from this in his only onscreen appearance and spends a good fourth of the movie recovering from it slowly. Of course, returning from the dead several hours after one has died apparently does that to you, even if it's not unusual for the Doctor.

And he does it again in the spinoff novels, after he destroys Gallifrey (the first time, not the time that the Ninth Doctor spends his tenure angsting about). Oddly, he never really gets his memory back.

It finally gets revealed that it's not trauma-induced at all; as he points out, he didn't get it when he was destroying entire universes. In fact, he suffers amnesia because he's storing the entire Matrix in his mind, ready to recreate Gallifrey.

Also, in "The Next Doctor," the guy who thinks he's The Doctor isn't actually a future regeneration: Applied Phlebotinum gave him some of the Doctor's memories, while personal tragedy made him forget his own. The Doctor refers to it as a fugue state.

This happens at least twice in Mash with Hawkeye. In one episode, he incorrectly remembers a friend of his pulling him out of a lake to save him from drowning. Hawkeye had suppressed the memory that his friend had actually pushed him in before he saved him. In the final episode, Hawkeye had another problem with recalling his memories when Hawkeye remembers that he had inadvertently contributed to the death of a baby on a bus in enemy territory.

There were others. In one, Sidney is brought in after a soldier comes in with no memory of who he was. After hypnotizing him and recreating the battle he was in with help from Hawkeye and BJ, we discover the soldier's younger brother was killed in the battle.

Another dealt with a soldier who claimed to be Jesus Christ. Sidney AND Col. Flagg are brought in to find out who he was.

Played for comedy, in Dinosaurs Earl and Fran suffered so much from their experiences with their two oldest kids while they are two, that they had blocked out the entire year.

In the Korean SeriesWinter Sonata, Kang Joon Sang gets hit by a bus at age 18 and loses his memory, only to have it return 10 years later when he gets hit by a bus a second time.

In an episode of The Twilight Zone a woman has repressed memories of, as a child, being burned and witnessing a criminal killing her mother - When she gains her memories back, she realizes that a male visitor is the criminal and that he is trying to kill her.

The eponymous character of Dexter blocked out the memory of witnessing his mother's gruesome murder as a very young child, which was apparently so traumatic that it still turned him into a serial killer even though he didn't remember it until towards the end of season one of the series.

He and his older brother were separated after spending three days locked up in a packing crate with their mother's chainsaw-dismembered corpse. In Miami. A couple inches deep in blood. Although Dexter was young enough to repress it and Brian wasn't, both developed into serial killers with a penchant for extremely tidy dismemberment.

In Sharpe's Peril, Henry Simmerson loses his memory after being strung up naked in the Indian sun. It actually makes him a nicer person, compared to the arrogant bastard he was before, to the point he's even seen playing pat-a-cake with a young Indian girl.

In the season 9 premiere of NCIS Tony is shot and cannot remember what happened. A psychologist talks his through the preceding events until he can remember who shot him.

Similar to the above example, in the mid-season finale of the second season of White Collar, Mozzie is shot and later cannot remember anything about the shooting.

It's worse for him because he has perfect recall, so not being able to remember something would be pretty jarring.

In the season 4 premiere of Castle after being shot Beckett tells Castle that she does not remember anything about the shooting. She remembers everything but does not want to deal with his Love Confession.

A key part of the crime drama Unforgettable. The female lead has absolute perfect memory, but there's one day she cannot remember: the day her sister was murdered. She's convinced that if she can recover her memories of finding Rachel's body, she'll discover a clue as to who killed her.

Highlander: The Series episode "Through A Glass Darkly": An Immortal has a kind of mental meltdown in which he takes his student's head and the trauma triggers amnesia and a Fugue State.

Episode "Patient Number 7": An Immortal woke up in a mental hospital with no memory of who or what she is, or why the police and armed thugs are chasing her. Her trauma was when the thugs murdered her husband right in front of her.

In the NBC series Awake, Detective Britten cannot remember what happened before the car accident that killed either his wife or son, depending on which reality he's in.

Sherlock episode "The Hounds of Baskerville" has Henry Knight claiming he watched his father being savaged by a hound when he was a young boy. It turns out that he actually watched his father being murdered by a scientist while under the effects of a hallucinogenic chemical; the 'hound' was something his mind created to cope with the trauma.

A favorite Soap Opera trope. The most famous example being with General Hospital's Jason Quartermaine. Unlike nearly all other examples of this trope, he never regained the memories of his old life before the car accident that caused his head injury.

Forever Knight "Night In Question" has Nick losing his memory after a shot to the head. It also makes him forget he's a vampire for a while.

The main plot of the episode A Clean Escape from Masters Of Science Fiction, which revolves around a psychiatrist treating a patient with a severe case of retroactive amnesia, he cant seem to form new memories beyond leaving his house and being sent to her office, which occured 24 years prior. The "office" is inside a goverment bunker, and the patient is the former president of the United States. Having ordered a nuclear strike, the Kill Sat that was used had a much stronger effect than intended, and ended up causing a nuclear holocaust that wiped out humanity. Faced with this and his family's death in the retaliatory strike on Washington, the Presidents mind cracked, and sealed away all memories of him ever having been President, with his last memory being of him still being a goverment weapons contractor

Babylon 5: Late in season 4, Sheridan is set up for capture by [[Michael Garibaldi, his former security chief.]] When he comes leading a party to extract Sheridan, who's been subjected to a long "processing" routine designed to break his spirit, the captain looks at him and says "I was going to kick your butt for something, but I don't remember what".

Radio

Riders Radio Theater's "Phantom of the Valley" arc involves Ranger Doug losing his memory and believing himself to be a Zorro Expy after awakening in said Expy's lair.

Video Games

Used by the player character Daniel in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, hence the name. He writes a note to himself prior to taking a drug which causes him to lose his memory, and as you play the game you begin to learn why he did it He opened up a Sealed Evil in a Can and then in an attempt to remove the curse placed on him, he ended up helping a guy kill those whom he thought were criminals and murderers. Except it turns out to be innocent people he may have been slaughtering.

As their reward, the two of them get nabbed up by the military's local Mad Scientist and experimented on. Zack doesn't break through the sedatives for years, and after he breaks both of them out, Cloud is horribly poisoned by the experimentation and comatose. Zack spends days if not weeks or months carrying Cloud around, telling him about himself, his past, and his goals, trying to get his companion and best friend to revive. When the two of them are finally cornered by the army, who have been told that they'redangerous, Zack walks away after hiding Cloud, so as to confront the military head-on. Alone. A brilliant plan. Not that he had much of a choice. Cloud's first movement on his own is weakly reaching one hand for Zack, unseen, as Zack walks away. By nightfall, Cloud's managed to get to his feet... and finds Zack where he was left alone to bleed to death, in time for Zack to give him his sword.

Between the trauma, the experimentation, the coma, the talk during a vulnerable and suggestible state, and now moretrauma... by the time Cloud reaches the nearest city, he still remembers his childhood, but thinks Zack's adulthood and career was his own, can't remember half of what happened for the massacre at home (and thinks he was Zack for the other half), and isn't even quite sure why he's at this city again.

He was injected with a large amount of Jenova cells during the experiments. Jenova, being The Virus, tends to have nasty effects on a person's body and mind. The only plus side to all this was that the experiments weren't all that different from the process used to create a SOLDIER, meaning Cloud now does have the skills and abilities of a SOLDIER 1st Class that he claims to be...

In Tales of the Abyss, Luke has Trauma-Induced Amnesia from a kidnapping seven years ago that wiped out all of his memories of the event — as well as all memories of events prior to the kidnapping — while Guy has amnesia about the death of his family. In Luke's case it's subverted once it turns out that the Luke that got kidnapped wasn't the one his family got back — and the recovered one didn't exist prior to the kidnapping.

The PC of Geneforge 5 has this, from what information the player is able to gather. Many significant NPC's from throughout the series claim to vaguely recognize you, and new characters describe your past behavior from senseless rage to Super-Power Meltdown. Though speculation is rampant, the true identity is only answered by the Shrug of God. Maybe it's just a device to justify re-explaining everything previous players should know, but new players wouldn't, and explain why the PC wouldn't have any defined relationship to previously famous NPC's.

This happened to Shadow the Hedgehog in the Sonic the Hedgehog series following his apparent death in Sonic Adventure 2, when he fell after teleporting Space Colony A.R.K. back into a stable orbit. Understandable, as there was presumably head trauma involved. Apparently, the robot Eggman used to stop Shadow's fall was a bit clumsy. His quest in the next two games was to regain his lost memories. Poor Shadow, since he had only overridden the fake memory intended to make him destroy the world a few minutes prior to his apparent death.

Xenosaga: Shion saw both her parents being killed in front of her eyes, and then she resonated with the Zohar, calling the Gnosis and basically destroyed an entire planet... so she blocked all the memory from her childhood and that event.

Oichi from Sengoku Basara. It's revealed that after her husband Nagamasa was murdered before her eyes by her brother, she went crazy and was enslaved by her dark powers, which made her forget it all. By the third game, she's basically a blank slate.

Ventus of Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. You'd forget stuff too if someone you thought you could trust caused you to get beaten into unconciousness, then quite literally cut your heart in half.

Invoked in Golden Sun. The antagonists decide the memory of their crimes out of the witnesses.

In The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Joshua seems to be suffering from this, though nobody can figure out why. It's due to the fact that he doesn't want to remember that he, himself is the one who brutally murdered his own family, though not entirely of his own will.

May be a factor in why the PlayerCharacters of Knights of the Old Republic aren't going to say anything about their pasts. Malak's attack left Revan very close to death, and the Exile's been through so much War Is Hell that the only way to stay halfway sane would be to spend the last decade working on forgetting.

Some of the events of Assassin's Creed II have been supressed in Ezio's memories, and only become available to Desmond in Brotherhood when he has achieved a greater level of sync. These memories include giving a Viking Funeral to his father and brothers after their execution, finding out his girlfriend Christina has left him for another man and delivering an If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her... speech to her new fiance, getting snubbed after trying to reignite his love for Christina during the Venezia carnival, and Christina dying in his arms after being attacked during the bonfire of the vanities.

In Skyrim, a priestess from a cult of cannibals claims that the Dovahkiin lost a sibling when they were a child, and took a bite out of the corpse out of curiosity, making the two of them Not So Different. If the Dovahkiin denies any knowledge of this event, she claims that most people block out the memories of their first incident of cannibalism out of revulsion. Whether or not she's telling the truth is left up to the player to decide.

Quantum Conundrum has this with Professor Quadwrangle. Thankfully, the only thing he forgot is what went wrong during his experiment and how he got stranded in a pocket dimension.

In Metal Gear Solid 2, the protagonist Raiden only finds out near the end of the game that he's a former child soldier, which he has repressed his memories of.

Played realistically in Persona 4 where the the kidnap victims you rescue from the TV world typically have hazy memories of the ordeal, mostly due to stress and exhaustionnote Shadows aren't the only dangerous thing about The TV world; The fog that constantly hangs over the place can actually make a person ill after a while (least till they build up a resistance).

In P4 Golden the good ending reveals that Nanako (the protagonists younger cousin\surrogate little sister) remembers almost nothing from either her kidnapping or her time in the TV world, only that Big Bro and his friends had saved her from something. Naoto voices the opinion that this is probably for the best.

Siegfried from the Soul Series is travelling the world looking for his father's killer, but doesn't know who the killer actually is. The killer is himself; he accidentally murdered his own father in a bandit raid, and when he realised what he had done ran into the forest, went mad and convinced himself that someone else had done his dad in..

In Bravely Default this appears to be the cause of Ringabel's amnesia. As Alternis Dim in the world before the one the game starts in, he witnessed Airy kill Edea and lost his memory as a result. The amnesia is so absolute he initially has no idea of who he really is, and his persaonlity as Ringabel is a stark contrast to that of the young man who wrote D's Journal. Even regaining his memories does not cause his personality to revert back to his 'original' one.

This was the given reason why Ema's and Edgeworth's respective memories of SL-9 and DL-6 were incredibly foggy and incomplete. Of, course, in Edgeworth's case, it turns out that the only thing he really forgot was throwing a gun. He was unconscious for all of the remaining time.

This trope returns in Dual Destinies, this time affecting Athena Cykes. Like in the above examples with Ema and Edgeworth, this amnesia allows her to be accused of committing the crime she has blocked out from her memory — in this case, the murder of Athena's mother Metis. It's really not helped by the circumstances in which Metis's corpse was found note (including a young Athena being found all covered in her mom's blood) and the implication that Metis might have used Athena as a guinea pig in her experiments and thus "gave" her a reason to snap at hernote (she didn't, she was trying to help Athena with her Power Incontinence)

And again in Spirit of Justice, this time tragically inverted. Sorin Sprocket was in a car accident that killed his sister and gave him anterograde amnesia. Whenever he goes to sleep, he loses all new memories made that day. Instead of blocking out the traumatic event in his life, he's forced to have it be the freshest thing in his mind every single time he wakes up.

Happens to Chris Redfield in Resident Evil 6 where his entire squad was killed in a horrific bioterrorist attack by Fake!Ada Wong/Carla Radames and he couldn't do anything but watch them get wrapped up in a flesh like cocoon before one of them hatches and becomes a horrific monster. Chris then spends the next several months drinking to forget what happened and it isn't until Piers forces Chris to remember what went down months ago while the two of them engage in a mission similar to the one that traumatized him that Chris painfully remembers what happened and vows to get revenge on Ada's clone.

This is what happens to the player character of the PC mystery game Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek. She knows she's in her current location in search of the answers to a case, and she finds her own notes and realizes she was approaching a breakthrough, but she doesn't know what happened next or why she can't remember. The player must help her reclaim her memories, solve the murder mystery, and get the hell out of Dodge before someone kills her too.

Visual Novels

Onisarashi-hen arc of Higurashi: When They Cry. Actually, the manga version of Onikakushi-hen has this too. That is, until Keiichi notices his room...

It turns out that Umineko: When They Cry's entire plot revolves around this trope, since the entire series is essentially Battler remembering his past through testimonies and theories in the future.

Shirou of Fate/stay night has no memory of his life before the Fuyuki City fire. His first memory is of his adoptive father Kiritsugu pulling him out of the flames. This is explicitly a result of extreme trauma; most of his personalissues are about getting over the trauma, and as the story goes on, he remembers more of the event.

However, the Heaven's Feel route has a case that's ambiguous as to whether it's mental trauma, or just physical: after having Archer's arm grafted onto his body, Shirou starts having a physical and mental breakdown as a result of his powers. When he kills a Brainwashed and CrazySaber, he immediately forgets everything about her; it's not clear if it was due to the trauma of the incident, just his brain finally giving in to his breakdown, or maybe even a mix of both.

Yuuichi from Kanon forgot nearly everything about the town where Nayuki lived in because he witnessed, and believes he's responsible for, Ayu falling off a tree and her resulting coma. This drives the plot, by the way.

Komari from Little Busters!went through this after her brother died due to him convincing her that it was all a dream. As a result she repressed the memories of him, though they still affect her dreams. The memories can be triggered into returning when she sees blood or death, but this causes her to Heroic B.S.O.D. all over again and then, after a day or two, attempt to recover by pretending someone else is her brother and repressing everything all over again. In the end, Riki is able to break the cycle, forcing Komari to accept the reality of his death and allowing her to grieve over it naturally.

The player character of Queen at Arms suffers from this, after the traumatic attack on her homeland's castle when she was orphaned as a child. What she can't remember is that she's the princess, and she witnessed the murders of her parents.

This may be the case with Charles and Delia in Cobweb And Stripes. It's not actually stated why they have no memory of the backstory of the comic, but given the nightmarish events they survived, it could very well be this.

In one episode, Homer is hypnotized, which triggers his memory of finding a dead body in the old swimming hole.

Helga Pataki of Hey Arnold! suffers from this in the episode "Beaned" when she's struck by a baseball hit by old 'Dangerous Lumber' himself, Arnold. After waking up fully recovered the next morning, Helga continues faking her amnesia to guilt-trip Arnold into taking care of her, but begins to feel sorry for forcing him to pay attention to her. She fakes another head injury which 'cures' her amnesia and uses her usual crabby bluster to try and put some distance between them, but is pleasantly surprised that he still wants to make sure she's okay.

Played for laughs with the eponymous Archer in the episode "Fugue and Riffs." The trauma: Mallory got married.

Real Life

Truth in Television, at least as far as physical trauma (especially to the head) is concerned. Global amnesia is a very real phenomenon that affects people who have been in car accidents and similar traumatic incidents. On the end of emotional or psychological trauma, there is vigorous debate to what extent it occurs, but dissociative disorders - particularly dissociative amnesia - are what this trope is based off of.

It falls under a category called 'Motivated Forgetting'. It is divided into two categories - repression and suppression. Repression is the Sigmund Freud style "it's too hurtful to remember so your subconscious buries it" stuff, and suppression is when you actively try to forget something. Repression has a little bit of evidence in that child abuse victims often can not recall the abuse later in life. Suppression can also occur to a certain degree, wherein people who concentrate on forgetting something are less likely to be able to recall it at a later time when asked to do so.

It may not really count as forgetting, but shocking events which take a very short time to happen sometimes simply don't register in the brain in the first place; this can happen to road accident victims or similar. A head injury that results in immediate unconsciousness is virtually never recalled afterwards, because the same trauma that forces the brain to interrupt consciousness also interrupts the process of memory storage.

Dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue disordernote a condition characterized by long-term departure from one's home and the psychological creation of a new identity., and dissociative identity disorder note a condition characterized by the presence of multiple, independent identities and one that is the subject of a great deal of debate among psychologists. are the most extreme cases. Of course debate rages on as to how many true or planted examples there have been, but theoretically the brain is malleable enough when young so that if you experience emotional trauma as a very small child, your mind can protect itself by "pushing away" the memories, believing it didn't happen or it happened to someone else. But even if you don't remember it, it's still there. The brain can protect itself from immediate damage by blocking out the harmful memories themselves, but the trauma will always find some other way to manifest itself until it's dealt with

When he was a boy, Stephen King saw a friend hit by a train; he claims to have no memory of the incident.

Some sources say that this trope is completely false, that traumatic events can't be forgotten. Ever.

The sources that tend to assert that emotionally and psychologically traumatic events can't be forgotten (Ever) tend to be technically correct, in the adrenaline and heightened stimulus response in the hippocampus and parahippocampus of the brain tend to embed traumatic events more strongly in an individual's memory. However, that said, this trope does occur regularly and this is why: although the event itself cannot be forgotten, the mind will deliberately sublimate and repress the traumatic memory in order to try to retain a degree of emotional and mental stability in the case where an event would be traumatic enough to instigate a dissociative fugue. Many victims of violence, particularly sexual violence as children, will not remember the events until either a trigger brings back the suppressed memory or the memory suppression eventually resolves itself as the mind starts to deal with and handle the trauma (usually when the individual is an adult and emotionally stable enough to deal with it) - the memory often starting to re-appear through dreams or nightmares. Usually in these cases, there will be a generalised dissociative state immediately following the traumatic event, and some changes in behaviour or personality may be noticed over the short term.

One question that is asked of people being assessed for PTSD is whether or not they're unable to remember a significant part of a traumatic event. For those who are, they'll be able to remember a great deal of what traumatized them in horrifying detail with the exception of a portion of what happened to them.

Holocaust Survivor Zoltan Zinn Collis, who was saved from Bergin Belsen concentration camp at the age of five, claims to remember atrocities, but to have no memory of his own emotional response to them at the time. This is known as dissociation and is quite common among those who have lived through a trauma.

Between the physical and psychological trauma, the Central Park Jogger, Tricia Meili, has no memory of the night she was attacked beyond leaving her apartment to go for her nightly run.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy